Month: November 2021

with some of my friends, who, if you’re one of them, sorry I am not waiting til our next discussion, but, with some of my friends I am reading Bleeding Edge (2013), by Thomas Pynchon. anyone who knows me knows I love Pynchon and could read Gravity’s Rainbow over and over and over and over. I feel so under the thumb of Gravity’s Rainbow that I sometimes wonder if there’s even anything to add, novel-writing-wise. I certainly enjoy some of the novels Pynchon published after GR, namely Vineland and Inherent Vice, and I haven’t yet read the other big-ass novels, Mason & Dixon and Against the Day. but GR is like scripture to me.

Bleeding Edge, however, is proving to be very frustrating. the plotlines are more clearly delineated than in GR or V., the jokes and puns are sharper and funnier than in The Crying of Lot 49 or Vineland, and it’s a world I was actually alive for, unlike anything else in his oeuvre. this aspect is what’s most impressive to me about Bleeding Edge; not only are the pop culture references fine-tuned, Pynchon is way more comfortable making jokes about Britney Spears and JavaScript than any septuagenarian has any right to be. but as the novel progresses, I find myself less and less interested. the scenes are fun, the characters enjoyable, the information well organized, but there’s something missing. the paranoia is oddly muted, and the maniacal urgency isn’t there.

as I struggle to get started on my own novel, I have been wondering what exactly is required of a writer trying to grapple with the far reaching shifts occurring as a result of the internet’s domination of our lives. “The Pynchon method” of conjuring a secret conspiracy that may or may not be a projection of the protagonist’s addled mind is appealing to me because it’s fun, it’s an artful way of allegorizing aspects of living under technocratic capitalism, it resonates with my own paranoid tendencies, and it lends itself to meta-explorations of consciousness and language. but I often ask myself if that method works as well as it does in Gravity’s Rainbow because there’s something to the idea that cabals of elites orchestrated, or at least capitalized on, the chaos of WWII to implement a new market formation. maybe that new market formation, now fully blossomed into Neoliberalism™, does not need power to be occluded in the same way, since They won.

I asked Angie, who already finished reading the book, if she thinks the breeziness of Bleeding Edge, and the (relative) lack of subtext, are Pynchon’s way of arguing that technocratic neoliberalism, with its erosion of the possibility of secrecy, make obsolete his previous mapping of elites vs. preterite resistors. Joshua Cohen argues something like this in his review of the novel. (this is the only Pynchon novel I’ve sought out reviews of, and, as a sidenote, it’s conspicuous how many of them are careful to assure the reader that Pynchon is not a 9/11 truther, for some bizarre reason). I also asked Angie if she’s thinks this is true re technocratic neoliberalism, which she does not.

I agree, but it does not make the task easier; if anything, the kind of flight and refusal GR embodies, which is nothing if not the transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau retooled for the the Society of Control and Spectacle, is even more elusive, and therefore more urgent. so why does it seem like Pynchon isn’t interested in it any more, like he doesn’t even have anything to say about it?

in the same review, Cohen makes reference to a way of reading Pynchon’s work, outlined by Charles Hollander, “as revenge against the Rockefellers and their dismantling of the Morgan economy of steel, coal, and railroads in favor of an economy of plastics, oil, and weaponry.” (the Morgan [as in J.P.] and the Pynchon families were elite American bedfellows, all the way back to 17th century Massachusetts.) this reading make sense to me, if a little reductive, and it hints at what may be going on with Bleeding Edge. In Gravity’s Rainbow, there’s very real anger on Pynchon’s part, rage even, directed at the entire American Establishment of which he is a consummate product: the son of a wealthy East Coast Republican family, an Ivy Leaguer who did a stint in the Navy. a palpable crisis of conscience occurs between the covers of GR.

I can relate. my name is not storied like Pynchon, and there are no Hawthorne characters based on members of my family, but I am definitely a Yankee descended from Puritanical New England Weirdoes. from the looks of my family tree, despite being raised Catholic (as was Pynchon), I’m nearly as WASPy as anyone with a home on Martha’s Vineyard. my dad’s former FBI. he and my former Navy grandfather both very strongly urged me to go to the Naval Academy; I’m convinced that if I were the kind of person who cared enough about school to get into Annapolis, I would have been groomed for recruitment into an intelligence service. Pynchon’s early literary career is a full-throated denouncement of his heritage, and a paean to the laziness that kept him from being a CIA agent.

in this light, Bleeding Edge reads like apologia for his ultimate submission to mainstream life, for his marriage to the great-granddaughter of Teddy Roosevelt, and for his enjoyment of the comforts provided by the “Yupper” West Side. there are none of the extended philosophical reveries (or, to quote Inherent Vice‘s LAPD antagonist Bigfoot Bjornsen, “paranoid hippie monologues”) so characteristic of GR. that novel’s principled middle finger is nowhere to be found. there’s little interest in pulling back the curtain on the “real” machinations of power, the impulse for which arose out of his proximity with, and his extreme revulsion at, those machinations; instead, I feel like he’s given up, saying “man, I’m old, I tried, my life is nice now, what do you want me to do?”

or perhaps more generously, Pynchon the wealthy, elderly New York writer just doesn’t have to deal with the problems dealt to those striving to live an authentic life in the age of social media and digital surveillance, any more than he has to deal with the problems he faced as a 30-year-old wannabe bohemian terrified by the rapid expansion of the police state and the attendant encroachment onto personal liberty.

if I’m half as lucky as him, when I’m 76, some punk brat will be complaining that I lost my edge too.

bought an Akai Professional MPK Mini MKII MIDI controller, used. the USB 2 cable required to connect to a computer was not included. the cable I ordered on A****n arrived today. eager to start making Sick Beats, or maybe some chill lofi hip-hop to study/relax to, I plugged everything in, and the buttons light up, the pads respond to finger drumming, but Ableton doesn’t register anything. doesn’t even see any controller plugged in.

rather than throw the keyboard against the wall, I’m interpreting this as a Sign to focus my creative energies elsewhere.

outside the window, Santa Ana winds whip maniacally

do not expect to see me. I am losing myself

there’s a used bookstore up in Ojai called Bart’s Books, which bills itself as the “world’s greatest outdoor bookstore.” I can’t pass judgement on that claim, but it does rock; I’ve never been to a better stocked used bookstore anywhere. it wasn’t until my last visit over this past weekend, however, that I finally found the bookshelf I’ve long been hoping to find there.

Ojai, if you don’t know, is a weirdo pseudohippy colony about two hours north of Los Angeles. Madame Blavatsky moved the Hollywood-based Krotona Institute, an institute for Theosophy, to Ojai in 1926 on the belief that LA was stifling the group’s peace-and-love spirit. Jidda Krishnamurti, Aldous Huxley, and other freaks founded the Happy Valley School in the area as well, which later adopted the name Besant Hill in honor of prominent female Freemason and Theosophist Annie Besant. so I naturally expected to find all sorts of fringe knowledge and alternate history books there. now I know where to find them, tucked away behind the desk.

here’s a list of what I picked up on my last visit.

The Archaic Revival, Terence McKenna

now, to be clear, McKenna is sort of a crank. I like his book Food of the Gods, which offers a rigorous and thought-provoking analysis of the influence and popularity of various psychoactive drugs under different sociohistorical regimes: for example, the complementariness between coffee’s effects and the demands of industrial capitalism. other ideas he promotes, like the Stoned Ape Theory of human evolution, which posits that psychedelic mushrooms catalyzed the transition from savannah primates to Human Beings, are interesting thought experiments, if not exactly scientific (or totally convincing). but I always give McKenna more credit than I probably should because, being a former literary scholar who claimed he would have been a Nabokov expert if he hadn’t taken those fateful trips with South American shamans, McKenna argued that literature ought to assume the position that physics currently enjoys as the central epistemological lens for understanding reality. this I agree with unreservedly.

I am willing to have this book convince me McKenna is not sort of a crank. also, who am I to accuse anyone of being a crank? I have no other fate outside crankdom. I’m reading PD Ouspensky, for chrissakes.

Earth in Upheaval, Immanuel Velikovsky

case in point re crankdom. Velikovsky is famous for proposing that interplanetary catastrophes in the not-too-distant past are responsible for wide-scale evolutionary and geological changes on Earth. Close passes by Venus (itself ejected by Jupiter, natch) led to shifts in Earth’s axis and orbit, and these events are encoded in humanity’s earliest myths. Earth in Upheaval is the supposedly sober-minded companion piece to Velikovsky’s prime work, Worlds in Collision, a work roundly discredited by mainstream science. being impressionable and highly curious, I am of the belief that we ultimately don’t know anything about anything, so why not entertain some pseudoscientific alternate histories?

2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, Daniel Pinchbeck

man, remember 2012? what a time to be alive.

I’m interested in this for the purpose of using the Quetzalcoatl phenomenon as a metaphor I am not going to elucidate here. I anticipate finding Pinchbeck kind of annoying.

Dreamland: Travels Inside the Secret World of Roswell and Area 51, Phil Patton

when I flipped to the back cover of this book, which promises to be a travelogue-cum-investigative-report into Area 51, UFO sightings, and secret military programs, to find that none other than Thomas Pynchon himself provided a blurb, I never felt more successfully marketed to in my entire life.

The Meaning of Mariah Carey, Mariah Carey (with Michaela Angela Davis)

this was on a different shelf.

Today, love is being positivized into a formula for enjoyment. Above all, love is supposed to generate pleasant feelings. It no longer represents plot, narration, or drama—only inconsequential emotion and arousal. It is free from the negativity of injury, assault, or crashing. To fall (in love) would already be too negative. Yet it is precisely such negativity that constitutes love: “Love is not a possibility, is not due to our initiative, is without reason; it invades and wounds us.” [Levinas] Achievement society—which is dominated by ability, and where everything is possible and everything occurs as an initiative and a project—has no access to love as something that wounds or incites passion.

Byung-Chul Han, The Agony of Eros

wanna know a secret? well too fuckin bad, cuz I guard mine like they’re the rim and I’m Bill Walton (November 5). admittedly, I don’t really know much about basketball. I am attempting to follow this season, and my Lakers barely squeaked by the 1-and-6 Rockets the other night. I do not understand the Lakers’ offensive strategy. what does Russell Westbrook (November 12) add to the team? again, stupid person talking, but I don’t think his passing game is really making or breaking anything for them. it’s like he’s not even on the same team as everyone else.

y’all ever very obviously fudge part of a task you’ve been assigned, most of which hums along satisfactorily, but when time comes for the assigner to sign off on your submission, they call you out on the part you’re fudging and make you do it again, so you shuffle it around and send it back promptly but get left watching your email until the assigner finally accepts the very last of the work you need to do to be free? another way of putting this, how do I stop obsessively staring at my email? I feel like I’m being held hostage by my graduate advisor. I’m so fucking close to being rid of this bullshit.

once I am rid of this bullshit, I will, after a brief respite, be diving headfirst into my stagnant art projects. there’s nothing to be said here of the Big Thing I’m working on other than that I have shed all self-defeating hesitation on the matter. this novel is getting written by me one way or the other. other than writing, which I’m stuck doing no matter how much I vacillate on the value of fiction or the novel’s loss of stature in the culture, I’ve been playing the guitar more. I wouldn’t say that I can play the guitar quite yet, but I know how to play the guitar, if that distinction makes sense. I also plan to acquire a MIDI controller keyboard to make music on my laptop with. let me repeat: I barely know the guitar, but I intend to make music in the near future. so stay tuned on how that turns out. JPEGMAFIA, whose bday comes in just short of the Scorpio side of October (the 22nd), and his newest album put that fire under my ass. Adam advised me to keep a journal about my music making attempts, so maybe some of that will appear here at some point. he asked if I felt like I needed to express something that’s better suited to music than to fiction. Sontag argues that modern (ie contemporary) art tends to deal more in the interplay of constituent material, rather than it being an expression something specific through media, and I find it very easy to revel in the possibilities of music making, much easier than I do with language. but like I said, I’m cursed to write, so by altering course I’m not seeking the appropriate avenue to express something specific so much as widening my range of options for aesthetic play. and music is the most mysterious and explicitly occultist of the art forms, since it’s through creating tiny vibrations on the air that emotions aren’t just suggested, but foisted on the audience, as a magical spell. artful writing is also a kind of spell, but it’s easier to get hung up on Ideas with language-based arts, so I’m hoping that by pursuing music I can get some relief from my neurosis.

elsewhere, in an essay titlted “The Pornographic Imagination,” Sontag makes the point that it isn’t clear whether human sexuality ought to be understood as healthy and positive, something I spend a lot of time thinking about, since I’m preoccupied with sex. Colin Wilson, in his seminal work The Occult, argues that sexuality as we understand it now is a result of the sublimation of primitive erotic instincts into the social field created by urbanization millennia ago. he also argues that sexuality is one of the more stubborn primitive impulses, one our progressive domestication has not succeeded in muting. I don’t totally agree with Wilson’s argument, but I’m having a blast reading the book.

Today’s Google Doodle honors Charles K. Kao (November 4), who initiated the fiber optic revolution that allowed the internet to flourish into the Leviathan it is today. What’s more Scorpionic than a cryptic, all-powerful network of interstitial connection, the slow insinuation of which went largely unnoticed until it was too late?